Managing Your Omni Licenses

From the menu bar, choose OmniOutliner ▸ Licenses to see the Licenses dialog. From here you can review and edit your OmniOutliner licenses, which verify that you’ve actually paid for the software. (Thanks!)

You can disregard this chapter if you’ve purchased your copy of OmniOutliner (Essentials or Pro) from the Mac App Store, where licensing is done automatically at the time of purchase. This chapter applies only to licenses purchased from the Omni Store, and the Licenses menu item only appears for those purchases.

To check the status of your Mac App Store purchase, choose OmniOutliner ▸ In-App Purchase... instead.

To purchase a license:

  • Click Buy Licenses and you will find yourself magically transported to the Omni Store, where you can purchase a license for the Mac versions of our software. (Naturally, this only works if you have an Internet connection.)

To add a new license:

  1. From the menu bar, choose OmniOutliner ▸ Licenses to see the Licenses dialog.
  2. Click Add License.
  3. If you have a license key in an email message, copy and paste both the Owner name and the License Key into the appropriate fields. If you can’t copy and paste the information, you’ll have to type it in; make sure you enter everything exactly as it appears in your license message, including the dashes. Also, double-check that the license you’re entering really is a license for OmniOutliner 5; licenses for other Omni products or earlier versions of OmniOutliner won’t work.
  4. The Type drop-down menu is grayed out by default, which limits the license type to Personal for the current user account on your Mac. OmniOutliner has two different types of licenses:
    • Personal: This license is for your personal use, and will only be available on this computer when you are logged in as the user who installed the license. You can install this license on more than one computer, but only for your personal use. You should not use the software on two different computers at the same time with this kind of license. If a personal license is available, the application will always use it.
    • Computer: You can use this license on this computer, and so can any other user of this computer. However, you should not install this license on more computers than it has license seats for.

If there is more than one user account on your Mac, and you’d like everyone on your Mac to discover the awesomeness that is OmniOutliner, you’ll need to jump through a couple of hoops. To set up a Computer license, follow these steps:

  1. Quit OmniOutliner 5.
  2. Open a new Finder window.
  3. Switch the Finder’s view settings to Column, by choosing View ▸ as Columns (or use Command–3. This will make it easier for you to traverse the folder hierarchy on your Mac.
  4. Choose Go ▸ Computer.
  5. Choose your Mac’s hard drive (if you haven’t renamed it, it should be named Macintosh HD), and then traverse through the following folders:
    • Library
    • Application Support
  6. In the Application Support folder, create a new folder (choose File ▸ New Folder, or use Shift-Command-N) and name it Omni Group. You will need to enter your admin password to create a new folder at this level.
  7. In the Omni Group folder, create a new folder and name it Software Licenses.
  8. Open OmniOutliner 5 again, and then choose OmniOutliner ▸ Licenses.
  9. Click Add License.

When you click Add License, you’ll notice that the Type drop-down menu is no longer grayed out, and the Computer option is available for selection. Now just enter the Owner and License Key information you received from us, click Save, and you should be set.

To remove a license:

  1. Select the license you want to remove.
  2. Click Delete License.

To move a license from one Mac to another:

  1. First, find the license file on the old computer. Choose Go ▸ Go to Folder in Finder, and enter ~/Library/Application Support/Omni Group/Software Licenses. The file you are looking for has a name such as OmniOutliner–123456.omnilicense. Move this file to the new computer.
  2. On the new computer, choose OmniOutliner ▸ Licenses from the menu bar and then click Add License.
  3. On the sheet that appears, click Import License File.
  4. Locate and select the license file that you want to import.
  5. Click Open. If the license file is compatible—meaning, it is for the same version of OmniOutliner—the license will be added to OmniOutliner on your other system.

Again, the thing to remember here is that license keys are version-specific; the license key you have for OmniOutliner 4 is not compatible with OmniOutliner 5 (and vice versa).